Tomy and the Planet of Lies Read Free Page A

laid their machine pistols on the floor and gawped over their boss’s shoulder. Then they all wanted just such a picture for themselves and then finally a group picture with me. Marc shot the ‘family portrait’ from the car window and passed me the camera. I asked him to hand me a new packet of film—it was the last Polaroid film we had. Laughing I asked the five men to sit on the stones blocking the road and took two more pictures.
    After this display of magic, I began to heave one of the stones off the road and gestured to the men to help me with the others. After I gave the camera to the officer and showed him how to press the button, the others joined in with my stone-clearing activities. I got back behind the wheel and we waved and laughed, and then I put my foot down. It was the last checkpoint we came across and to this day, I don’t know whether it was a genuine one or not, or how long it had taken those road-blockers to realize that after the film had run out there would be no more magic pictures sliding out of the camera slit.
    The mountains lay behind us, and ahead of us stretched the endless desert, initially flanked on the right by the foothills, which gradually faded away as we drove on. The road became more of a dirt track, the surface transforming into a kind of corrugated strip with furrows spaced around 15 to 20 centimeters apart.
    Initially, I tried driving slowly over them but the Range Rover clattered, shook, and vibrated unbearably. Finally, I figured out that a driving speed of about 60 to 70 kilometers per hour was ideal. The only danger at that speed was where sudden sand drifts covered the bumpy road. If the wheels were caught at an angle in the sand the car would skid around in an instant—like on black ice, but without ice’s advantages: that you could see it and that it stopped at the edge of the road. Here, on the other hand, lurked quicksand where the whole vehicle could sink into the sand without leaving a trace.
    Sitting behind the wheel, I felt like one of those bulky men operating a jackhammer. Every bump was transmitted along my arms to my elbows. How long would the car hold out? The grey-beige color of the Range Rover was slowly being completely blanked out by white sand dust. How long would the air filter cope with that? When would the spark plugs and the distributor give up the ghost? Please, holy Saint Christopher, anything but a breakdown in this awful heat. The external temperature was now at about 50 degrees Celsius; I couldn’t lean my elbows out of the open window anymore because the metal of the doors was now hot enough to fry bacon.
    At around four in the afternoon, we saw a few houses in the middle of this forsaken desert. I drove up towards them until we could see a signboard bearing the legend: Customs. What was all that about? A customs post here in the middle of the desert? A lonely, old soldier in a dark brown t-shirt explained that this was the last Pakistani settlement, 200 kilometers before the Iranian border. He demanded twenty dollars in small bills, which I paid and then asked what the people here actually did. “Nothing,” he said. “We’re just here to keep an eye on the boarder.” The name of this desert backwater was Nok Kundi.
    We had just driven across purgatory and now we were driving directly into hell itself. The desert track became even more irregular, the gaps between the furrows in the road were randomly spaced, and the sudden sand drifts more frequent. There may have been no water here as far as the eye could see, but at least once a year it must rain cats and dogs because every once in a while the track simply disappeared, as if washed away. It wasn’t possible to manage much more than jogging tempo, no more than 20 kilometers per hour. In the rearview mirror I could see our endless dust trail rising up into the twilight, fanning out behind us like a pale gray veil.
    Seven p.m. The heat was still